I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals. As we have heard for a long time, if the bill for breaking the law is too small it is just a fee and if you steal from enough people it becomes a statistic.
I'm not optimistic about this. I think removing due process to allow for exporting people without any rights is a terrible idea. The writers of the declaration of independence specifically named these.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is the root of all evil in our society. Every violent criminal, every death of despair, it all can be tied directly to white collar crime.
White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.
This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.
If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.
A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.
But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
> I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals.
You are so right. Whatever the benefit of having laws at all is, it evaporates when laws are selectively not applied.
We're seeing the consequencefs of it today, in the "content creation" business and many other. It's a dog eat dog situation. Truth lost any relevance. As the influencer you know very well that whatever you're feeding your audience is empty hope, dreams and fantasy. As long as the check from IG/YT/TikTok is big enough, you don't care. Why care?
I think we might also find that who is rich and powerful can easily get flipped upside down over night. Being rich is not actually all that hard when law enforcement exists to uphold private property rights. But without rule of law, everything is quite literally up for grabs and might will make right. I hope our business leaders are mulling this fact over and considering whether they have either the force of personality or the physical strength to keep what they currently have in a new regime.
The crushing of margins crushes the middle class before it crushes the rich, there is no point where the rich cannot afford private security. While they may end up less wealthy in absolute terms they’ll likely end up more wealthy in relative terms.
> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
I think this is really important - 2A is about being able to arm a militia and only has value when a vast majority of the people are willing to put their life on the line against the military. It isn't magically an antidote to authoritarianism and it's a deep negative if too many of your neighbors don't like the look of you and don't believe in rights or the rule of law.
The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism. Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
>The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism.
The US is charting new ground here. Almost every other massively-oppressive state apparatus has prioritized restricting private firearms ownership early in their decent into tyranny for a reason.
> Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
The rate of firearms ownership in the US has been on a slow decline for the past 40-50 years (not sure how accurate data is before 1970 or 1980), from roughly 45% to 30%. School shootings have skyrocketed in the past ~30 years, and were pretty rare before Columbine. The two don't appear to be correlated. How do you reconcile this? I suspect that other societal factors are more salient causes.....perhaps the explosion in single-mother parenthood (something like 40% of all families now), combined with the known impacts on poor juvenile behavior in young boys and the explosion in "attention culture" courtesy of social media are the major factors in emotionally unstable teens gunning down their peers?
That said....I live in a country with almost no firearms and also have the peace of mind that nobody is gonna shoot my children. But I'm also in a homogeneous society that has almost no concern or risk level for their government turning tyrannical.
I derive substantial portions of my wealth-building from the military-industrial complex, while living outside of the US insulates me, and my children, from the worst of both America's fractured society AND from the authoritarian overreach that typically disproportionately affects minorities such as myself.
For my family unit, the path through all this chaos of imperial decline involves building up sustainable property ownership and revenue streams in Asia and Africa while winding down our US footprint to a minimum (real estate, social security/military pension/VA benefits).
For me to engage in an insurgency, the government would need to seize our US home, and/or cancel our benefits. Even then I'd need to work out some cost-benefit analysis to determine whether I could maximize my children's wealth by either a) continuing to build wealth outside the US or b) fighting to gain restitution via the new revolutionary government.
I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate, going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process and would justify brutal reprisals. An unarmed civilian crowd is far more persuasive for wavering troops ordered to fire on it.
In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
> I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
I don't disagree with that. People have to be invested in the cause first. Weapons are just tools there to both 1) discourage the powerful from attempting tyranny 2) ensure the people at least have access to the final arbiter of power: violence.
> Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate
It would be interesting to see the data on this. Peaceful protests didn't work in Syria or Myanmar, for example. Eventual armed rebellion succeeded in Syria...but still hasn't succeeded in Myanmar despite decades of conflict. Peaceful protests in China got rolled over by tanks in the 1980s (Tianamen). The Arab Spring was shut down pretty fiercely in Bahrain despite being unarmed, but I'm not that familiar with the details.
> going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process
You go to the seat of power, you kill or overpower the security forces, then you take the people inside who think they can oppress you, drag them out into the street, and shoot them. Show trials are optional but recommended. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae... )
> In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence." (great book series BTW) In all likelihood the US got really lucky with George Washington and that colors our national mythology, and by extension our perspective on armed rebellion. Because of course a military officer who breaks laws and uses violence against his government will be magnanimous, and not turn into a vicious and brutal druglord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Guzm%C3%A1n_Decena ).
It is the unholy union of a new unregulated form of communication, social media, and unregulated privatized intelligence companies, such as Palantir and Cambrdige Analytica.
Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.
You can't subject people who were illiterate subsistence farmers who never left their home town 50 years ago to highly processed foreign propaganda and expect good outcomes.
Funnily this (only its local not foreign propaganda) is kind of what's happening in India. The BJP (party in power) is leaning very heavily on propaganda towards the uneducated masses to boost their image.
The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.
That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.
There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."
They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.
What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
Citizenship is not some indelible mark on your person. It is likely at best some ink on a piece of paper or line in a database that can be lost, stolen, "forgotten", or denied.
Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them. How are you going to prove you are a citizen? What if I accused you of faking those documents? What is your recourse? How are you going to prove your citizenship? Are you going to go to the judge that was appointed by the person in power to plead your case? I already think you faked your documents, why should I let you have due process, I already know you are guilty.
Once you take away the structure of law these ideas that you think give you power, like citizenship, are just power on paper. The only real power you have is your friends and family getting upset and going to a journalist to plead your case to the court of public opinion, but maybe those journalists are employed by a billionaire, too, or they are scared they will fall out a window if they question the governments actions.
You are trusting someone who says if you give them power, they will solve your problems. But what if they don't, what if they start causing you problems? Who takes that power away once they already have it or have consolidated it with loyalists?
> Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them.
This isn't hypothetical, either. I know several US citizens whose documents are being confiscated and destroyed, because the current US regime has decided they're fraudulent. (One person had their passport printed, and then immediately destroyed.)
"The situation is bad so all rights can just be completely eliminated" is not actually a tenable position. "We had to do a fascism because of Biden" is not real. It is a choice. One that you need to own.
If the rule is "people we claim are illegal immigrants can be sent to a Salvadoran gulag for the rest of their lives without process and even if we admit we made a mistake with somebody we cannot bring them back" then this means that literally anybody can be sent there. The government just picks me up off the street, claims that I'm an illegal immigrant even though I am a citizen, puts me a on a plane, and then no law or court can save me from spending the rest of my life in hell.
> biden imported millions of third worlders with no vetting through a combination of lack of border enforcement and wide ranging refugee and amnesty efforts.
Everyone who told you those mistruths was lying to you hoping against you’d vote against your interests. Biden not only enforced immigration laws, he was doing so at a higher rate.
The fact a Secretary of Defense (second in command of the US military) and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (highest ranking officer and principle military advisor) have both said he is unfit and doesn't care about the law.
Jim Mattis, a Secretary of Defense, in a letter titled "I cannot remain silent":
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us... We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership... We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” [1]
Mark Milley, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent his final days in his position making sure that the military understood that they took an oath to the constitution before president. Mark Milley in his retirement speech said:
“Assumed it was settled law”, despite RBG herself at the time saying what amounted to “this is a flimsy interpretation that will likely be overturned, but we’re going to make it anyway and the government should codify it into law rather than relying on us legislating from the bench”.
Spoiler: No democratic president/congress ever bothered to, and it was rightfully (in a legal, not moral sense) overturned just as she predicted.
Please show me when there were 60 senators who would support this. Oh that's right at no point did that exist. Obama barely had 60 for Obamacare and that includes multiple people who would never vote for abortion. So your spoiler is quite divorced from reality
Even if there ever was a coalition of 60 pro-choice senators, it wouldn't matter. Federal abortion protections would need to be passed under the commerce clause and would obviously be challenged and struck down by the 6-3 court. Even EMTALA, which ties federal funding for hospitals to a requirement that hospitals provide abortion care for pregnant people when a pregnancy is a serious threat to their health, is being challenged in court (and successfully blocked in the 5th circuit). The challenge would be even easier for the right if there's no connection to serious threats to the health of the pregnant woman.
All of these "you should have ignored the courts and focused on legislation" arguments aren't based in a lick of reality.
RBG had more power than almost anybody else on the planet to protect Roe by retiring when the dems had the ability to confirm a replacement. She chose not to. Frankly, I don't think she's the best source of wisdom for practical politicking around protecting abortion rights.
Do you really think that federal abortion protections would stand up to this court? They aren't even able to stand behind EMTALA protecting abortions when it is essential for the health of the pregnant woman. There is absolutely no way that federal legislation protecting abortion up to viability would resist conservative challenge in the courts given the supreme court's current makeup.
No party has had 60 or more votes in the Senate for many many years. Which means nothing can pass under the goals of one party. The game is that one party says the measure being presented is unnecessary and redundant and doesnt vote in favor of that law. Rinse, repeat.
But yes, the culpability is ultimately on Congress.
The filibuster rule is determined by the senate itself, and could have been neutered at any point. The gridlock is a conscious choice of the senate majority.
>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
Where do you get your news from? I cross-checked your comment with Wikipedia. In the Sanlu case, the executives were sent to jail, and they were ordered to destroy their stock because Sanlu was on the brink of bankruptcy. Life imprisonment and the death penalty don’t exactly sound like a slap on the wrist to me.
The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?